


still no ending

by stiction



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, Gore, Horrorterrors - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 01:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3156602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would be foolish for you to think you could parlez with the Horrorterrors and come away unscathed.</p><p> </p><p>Or, Rose pays her debts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	still no ending

The pain comes suddenly - though the creeping gray mottle that takes over your skin comes slowly.

First across your ribs and chest, snaking down your stomach and legs and finally, finally, up your neck. It is worrying but many things in life have been worrying, so you try not to think much of it, not even as it takes on the dead and wilting look of the grimdark - or what you remember of it - a seamless color a few shades darker than the average troll’s skin. 

Mirrors are few and far between on the meteor; you begin to avoid them whenever you are less than fully dressed, unwillingly disturbed by the cloudiness surfacing under your wan skin like drops of dye in water. 

It doesn’t really matter that you ignore it, as it eventually makes its way up along the curve of your jaw. You don’t truly realize the change has reached so far until Kanaya reaches across the table stacked high with books, slipping a suddenly bold hand under the folds of your cowl. 

“What is this,” she demands, all sharp yet with a decided tremor in her voice that your heart echoes but you are resolute and composed, you are a sane and rational individual that has only just begun to hear the voices again. 

And even then they’re only whispers - growing louder with every passing day, yes, but only whispers, only the subtly seductive otherworld words of those you once called your masters. Once, if only for a few hours that stretched on like eons, every moment lived a thousand times and every sensation amplified as though through a metaphysical loudspeaker.

Kanaya is louder than the voices; your own thoughts are louder than the voices.

So you raise your hand to your neck as well, curl your fingers around hers as is and has been the custom; Kanaya, long past flushing at brushes of skin, turns a little green and grips your hand hard. Hard enough to hurt, hard enough for you to wrap your other hand around hers as well, to lift her knuckles to your lips for a kiss and an admittedly forced smile, in the hopes that she will relax.

And she does. 

“I’m fine,” you tell her. “It would be stupid to expect to parlez with the Horrorterrors and come out entirely unscathed. If I feel confident to the point of a deathwish again, I’ll tell you.”

She cracks a weak smile, her grip on your hand lessening to a normal, if a little firm, hold. The subject is dropped, but as the greying spreads you are reluctant to traverse the hallways as you used to - you are afraid to raise questions you yourself don’t know the answer to. 

News spreads regardless, and even your library haven is safe no longer. Dave hovers (for almost an entire day) no more than five feet from you at any given moment. Terezi  (who you avoided during its earlier stages for fear of premature discovery) proclaims your new smell ‘FR3SH D34D F1SH’ and loses interest. Karkat works himself up to just under the point of tears until you convince him that you feel fine, really, you feel just the same as you have for the entire first year of this journey. Gamzee doesn’t make an appearance (though you still feel that you can safely assume that Karkat spills every single detail to him whenever they cross paths).

But you are fine!

You were fine.

You  _are_  fine.

Up until you can’t find a single square inch of pink and normal flesh upon your person, now two days ago - or has it been three? You lose track. 

Kanaya touches your elbow, a worried eager light at your side, lips at your temple, a soothing and comfortable silence when you need it. She continues to aid you in your work, continues to decline offers of coffee, continues to stare and stare and stare.

But you wake up once more, wake up feeling slightly off-kilter and seek a mirror to find that your eyes are cloudy, pupils blown until not a trace of purple remains. You test yourself, find that speech functions remain intact, standard English that is comprehensible by the others. You bleed red (though you’re pretty sure you have always bled red) and feel the urge to breathe, if not the need. You can float, fly. You can See - possibly your Sight is a bit blurry, but that tends to happen at times that the group’s plans were changing regardless. And change they do, every day. 

The voices remain at a safe distance. 

If a little louder.

And an odd  ~~presence?~~   ~~feeling~~   _presence_  persists deep inside your core, shoved up under your ribs like a pressuring hand. A little like menstrual pains, like water retention only off schedule and - different. Your skin feels tight. 

This morning, this morning you wake up to a sound like waves in your mind, crests and troughs of sound and urges, your skin is alive and prickle-tingling. Full. You feel full. 

With some deep breaths, the noise abates to a murmur that you can think above without much effort, and your skin - your skin settles itself. The pressure in your abdomen rises in a hard clench when you sit up and get to your feet, but when you look down, your clothes hang straight and even against your freshly grey skin. Perhaps it’s a shade darker today. 

You can’t really tell.

Unsettling. But you don’t have time to ponder it; there’s a knock at your door and barely a heartbeat before the knocker sweeps in, all five-feet-seven-inches (or so) of pure and pulsing glow seemingly designed to give you a raging headache. 

Kanaya kisses your cheek and you smile, automatic yet not without a familiar surge of fondness. Her brightness compared to the former dim light of your bedroom makes your vision swim, and she is blurry as she kisses then your lips as well, tucking what must be a stray strand of hair behind your ear. 

“It’s two years today,” she says, a strange sort of ceremony in the declaration and her posture. “Almost a full sweep.”

“Really?” 

You’re not sure how you missed that; from the start you were one of the largest proponents of keeping a proper calendar - it would be important, you knew, to be able to keep track of where the meteor happened to be in its arc. It’s not as though you haven’t been distracted lately, though, you’ve had… things to take care of. The tome, Kanaya, yourself, occasionally Dave, in a rare moment, Karkat, when there are no other shoulders to weep profusely upon (at least, none that would keep that kind of secret for him). The others seem to fend for themselves well enough. 

“Yes.”

There’s a soft rustling, a quiet clinking of her fetch modus as Kanaya shuffles keys and cards, and then there are several outfits laid out on the bed-pile - familiar outfits. You touch the front of one pristine white, modified Squiddles shirt, tracing the black lines of the logo.. The contrast is stark between the fabric and your skin and you sigh through your nose, remembering when you first wore the shirt. 

Two years. 

“I thought we could do something…” Behind you, she pauses, collects herself. “Nostalgic.”

“Nostalgic,” you repeat, lifting the shirt from its bed of Scalemates. You remember fire and fear, and Jaspersprite - you do miss him - the rain you never learned to play, and your mother. All things you’ve lost. “Not to burst your bubble, Kanaya, but I’ve grown in the past two years.”

She makes an amused noise in her throat. “Don’t insult my skills as a seamstress.”

“You mean your skills with the Alchemiter.” 

It was hard to tell at first, but as you slip your hands through the shirt and its arm holes, the odd texture of the fabric tips you off. It’s just a little too silky for cotton, and at the same time heavier than you recall. Still, it’s an impressive recreation: A homage to the presumable hours that Kanaya spent observing you through a viewport before the collective apocalypse was brought about. 

She clears her throat and turns around, metal clinking once more as she removes what you assume are some of her old clothes from her sylladex. 

You change quickly, though it isn’t like she’s never had her hands on your bare back under your shirt, though only that and probably the better for it. Not for lack of sordid and ill-advised wanting. As Dave likes to put it - eyes on the prize. The prize being your lives, in this case. 

A lofty treasure that g- the noise in your head spikes hard. For a moment you reel in the aftermath, not your ears but your mind itself ringing, you stagger and almost drop, you would drop were it not for the Scalemate pile, surprisingly stable under your shaking arms. Deep breaths. Your pulse calms. 

You glance behind your back, dreading Kanaya’s panic. Relief comes soon, comes with a small and thrilling (and distracting) appreciation of Kanaya’s bare back as she steps into her dress. The wet-looking hole in her middle, not dripping but probably still moist were you to touch a hand to the raw inside of it. To touch your tongue to her severed skin. 

Pain, your nails digging fast into your palms, what are you thinking, what is wrong, why are the voices so loud why won’t they leave? 

You relax as she pulls the dress up over her back and pretend that you weren’t staring. Your sudden voracious hunger abates. A sick self-loathing, a sick feeling of fullness. Your body has grown with puberty but this is unnatural, though the clothes fit perfectly, perhaps even slightly too large. 

You have grown a bit thin, you suppose. Alchemized meals are just not the same, though you doubt you truly need to eat any more. And there’s no guarantee that alchemized clothes will fit properly. 

“I am finished,” Kanaya announces with a decisive nod, and turns, the slight bell of the skirt fanning out around her legs. The dress is green, painstakingly embroidered with yellow designs. You can see the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it, and the memories that accompany it. She smooths the skirt over her legs, smiling with a wry twist of lips. “It was the first dress I ever made entirely on my own.”

“It’s beautiful.” 

The praise comes in a raw burst from your throat, impossible to hold back, and though you feel shame in the vehemence she doesn’t seem to notice, turning instead to a mirror she must’ve pulled out of her sylladex while you were busy thinking in tongues. She outshines you (literally) in the boundaries of the frank, industrial frame. You in your white skirt and white shirt, feeling displaced in time. She in the green dress, grey bell sleeves the color of your skin. 

If nothing else, Kanaya seems pleased by it, and there’s a strange delight in this for you as well. Not all your memories of 4/13 are nightmarish. She lays a hand on your shoulder like she can tell, and suddenly you too feel the urgency to remember, to recollect in a roundabout way things that you’re not sure you want to think about directly. 

You reach for her hand, the prompt coming out almost-begging, certainly desperate, “The next ones now, yes?”

The look in her eyes is shocked first, not quite understanding second but sympathy second, for she too has lived aching days and slept aching nights. 

“Yes.” Punctuated by a soft and reassuring squeeze of her fingers. “The next ones now.”

On the velvety-dark dress your hands begin to shake a little, confusion and excitement tangling like snakes in your stomach. This one is a little tight - you accidentally grunt pulling it on, and Kanaya laughs, surprised and amused, gliding over to help you do up the back. 

“Human clothes.” She shakes her head, you can tell. “Troll clothes don’t bother with such irritatingly complex fastenings.” 

“Easy access?” You joke, bold, around a ripple of pressure in your abdomen, and it passes her completely by. As do most things in that vein, which is a blessing where Dave is concerned. 

“Exactly.” She tucks the hook home and turns you back towards the mirror. Her outfit seems slightly too small as well, a dress that is mostly one large, draping swathe of fuchsia fabric that trails behind her feet. The short purple skirt-front is a little silly, but you suppose it works, and in any case it is a beautiful thing. 

Beside you, reflected, she smooths her hands down over her stomach, resettling the fabric but you are thinking instead of the hole in her, the odd and gaping chasm that you could fit your entire hand through, probably. Unwillingly you think about putting your arm through the hole in your girlfriend’s stomach and feel a turn of revulsion. An undercurrent again of hunger. Swiftly a punishing cramp in your stomach; you breath in quick and in pity, in the next moment in pity and repentance her hands are on the back clasps of the dress. 

“Sorry,” she murmurs, “Sorry… should’ve known… improper fit.” 

Her voice fades in and out, drowned in waves by the rising voices and drowned and drowned, you struggle to resurface.

A deep breath. Kanaya’s hands at the very bare small of your back, her lips pressing light to the back of your jaw in apology. Her knuckles touch your spine and your hands shake a little as she steps away. 

You stand mostly naked, dazed, staring at the next outfit laid out for you. With your current pallor, it is poorly timed, but you know, don’t you, that Kanaya has spent quite some time on all of this and you know, don’t you, that it’s only a dress - it’s only a dress and you are resolute and composed, you are a sane and rational individual with a dark fire under her skin and something pulsing inside her that is not her heart. 

A blink, you’re dimly aware of some stunted and clumsy motion with your hands, and the dress is on you, the dress is a perfect fit, even in the chest where you had expected inevitable tightness. In the mirror, your fingers are dark against the pink scarf, light compared to the sweeping skirt. 

It’s only a black and white and purple dress. You are only a gray girl. Kanaya is only a glowing girl. Magic exists but magic is not here, not now, not woven into the threads of this dress so as to bring upon you the nightmares you buried eons ago. 

Deep inside you something writhes, hard, and you gasp again, breathless, doubling slightly over. Your vision wobbles, in the mirror you are a melting girl and you shut your eyes until you cannot see yourself. 

"Rose?"

And though your blood is pounding fast and with the wailing whispers of a thousand many-eyed gods, Kanaya’s voice is sharp and clear and  _oh_ , you wish it  _wasn’t_ , the fear and wonder in her call is rubbing off on you, you were afraid before, yes, you are afraid  _now_ , ready to cry out for a dead mother to save you as a hard push shoves up against your ribcage. 

Sticky liquid, vile like old blood, perhaps even your old blood, who knows, who cares because it hurts, it stings a little coming up. With a helpless moan you vomit, a hand pressed to your mouth that does nothing to stop it. Your eyes prickle and you realize you are almost crying, a knee-jerk reaction but fitting and-

“ _Rose!_ ”

The viscous black bile spills from your mouth onto the floor between your feet, your hand shaking in your field of vision and glistening. Inside you the twisting turns into a pushing, a slithering. Kanaya touches your arm; her face is frozen in concern and horror but mostly horror and you can’t blame her, there are tears streaming down your cheeks and the front of your shirt is wet with whatever is spilling out from inside you and you can’t breathe.

You can not breathe. 

Her grip tightens but Kanaya cannot save you, nobody can save you now because your throat is swelling fuller than is possible; your gag reflex brings you to your knees as your mouth too stretches to accomodate the twisting limbs of a monster. The slim tips of several writhing tentacles push past your teeth and lips in a gross and morbid parody of birth and you you you 

You can not breathe, you can only clutch your stomach and shove helpless fists up under your diaphram in an attempt to urge it on, urge it out, for something inside you knows that the sooner you excise the malignancy inside yourself the sooner you can breathe and the sooner the pain will go away. 

And it is not possible, it is not possible but it is happening that the tentacled mass has grown thicker and it must come out, it  _must_  come out and you  _must_  allow it to enter this world. In a sick and twisted manner you feel protective of it but it must come out or you will die. 

Above the shrieking voices of the Horrorterrors  _yes_  your old gods have returned and you are yet indebted you are yet called upon them in service as a  _vessel_  and a  _vassal_  and though the sounds of breaking bones reaches you through the cacophony you register no pain except the great pressure in your chest.

The rest of the writhing monster comes with greater ease, helped on by its own amniotic fluids, the oilslick substance that had so scared you only minutes ago ( _why, why be scared when you have been chosen to perform this duty, to pay off your debts in service?_ ) and by a blessed expansion of your mouth. But below the sweet sounding chorus of your masters your muscles are twitching in paroxysms of pain and though your mind has fallen prey to delusion your body knows and your body is  _terrified_  and part of you knows. This part of you is shrieking and writhing and thoroughly cognisant that you are vomiting up an unnatural being that has no right to have been in your stomach in the first place. 

With a final blissful and tortured jerk of your spine, the infant Horrorterror slips free of your swinging jaw and hits the ground with a slap. Its suckered limbs grasp at your hands as though it knows you its mother and savior. The duality in your mind grows weaker and though at first you welcome its cling you can’t help but recognize what ought to be repulsive, the rolling, mucusy eyes in protrudant sockets and the tiny teeth that bite into your skin as it pulls itself closer to you inch by struggling inch. 

You come back to yourself fully with a jolt like inertia, burning hot pain in your face and neck and your throat raw and  _you_  - this  _thing_  - you try to speak but all you can manage is a mangled groan that hurts so terribly you could throw up again. Black ichor drips from your disfigured jaw and you want to touch your face to feel the damage but your arms are bound tight by the terrible grasping thing and you cannot move you are  _you are so afraid_. 

Kanaya breathes in quick beside you and you try to tear your eyes from the beast sucking at your skin but you cannot, it holds you fast with several beady pupils and when the first blow falls you start and shriek aloud (or try to, at least). 

Something white in a white-skinned grip bears down again, again, until the eyes pop like grapes and it makes no sound yet you can hear it between your ears, the piteous and terrible harmony of ten thousand voices’ dying cries. And you hear- 

You hear Kanaya shouting, breathing hard and fast but shouting as well in a language you cannot translate but you know that she is willing it to die, to die and never return. The grasping limbs tighten at first, clenching fast until hot red blood runs down your arms and you groan again, shutting your eyes - and then its grip slackens - its grip disappears. The tentacles fall away from your skin, but Kanaya’s fevered bludgeoning continues, her words nothing but hoarse shrieks.

She stops suddenly, staring down at it as though willing the monster to move. The yellows of her eyes show in perfect circles around her irises and her shoulders tremble with effort and emotion. She is holding a teapot stained black on one side. 

It shatters and the pieces rattle on the metal floor. Tiny streams of jade drip down her hands where the porcelain cut her and you stare at them as a girl dazed. Your breath is noisy. Your ruined throat sears in waves. 

"Rose," Kanaya says. "You’re bleeding."

And that is the point at which you lose consciousness.

Then you are told when you wake that you slept for three days straight, that your mangled face healed itself, and that not a single grey mark remained on your skin after the second day. You are also told that Kanaya did not leave your side nor would she allow you to move and injure yourself when, in the grips of intensive recuperation, you tended to fuss. 

(You are told that she and Dave almost came to blows over your quarantine but you are not entirely sure how much of that you believe, no matter how much Terezi claims that that hallway reeked of L1COR1C3 3MOT1ONS for days.)

This is what you know: that you woke up pale and whole and feeling empty and safe; that your skin is still pale; that you can recollect babbling incoherently for a time during your bedrest, apologizing ad infinitum for ruining the dress and the special day; that you expelled an infant Horrorterror from your body; that Kanaya killed this infant Horrorterror with a teapot; that Terezi can’t distinguish between platonic and romantic hate to save her life; that you are still immortal; that this immortality lends itself well to curing massive bodily trauma; that this immortality is less helpful in the area of massive mental trauma; that it isn’t easy to forget vomiting up a tentacled monster. 

That you are not invincible - perhaps the hardest to swallow, though you thought beforehand that you knew this. 

You lay awake for hours and remember the exact sensation of suckers clutching at your arms; you yourself clutch now at Kanaya’s shoulders, straining to hear a heartbeat that you know by now is absent. But if you listen long enough you can hear yours, and that is enough to make believe. That is enough to  _sleep_.


End file.
